Canterbury spin out company wins an Auggie

Canterbury spin out company wins an Auggie for its
cutting-edge 3D app

July 2, 2014

A
University of Canterbury spin out company Puteko has won an
Auggie, an international augmented reality award, for its
app that turns colouring books into 3D.

Puteko's app
allows users to print, colour-in and then see the image
they've created come alive in a 3D animated world thanks to
clever augmented reality technology.

Auggies are given out
for the best augmented reality and wearable technologies,
films, tools and hardware. This is the fifth year of the
awards. The Auggie award included a prize of a one-year
licence for DAQRI 4D Studio, an augmented reality content
creation tool from the world’s leading augmented reality
developer DAQRI.

The Puteko app presents a really
well thought out, fun, inventive and novel use of augmented
reality technology. One of its designers, University of
Canterbury researcher Dr Adrian Clark, says that from the
beginning their focus was on the user experience, rather
than the technology. View a YouTube link of the app here:
http://youtu.be/EGMjsYHD7Ak.

``We really wanted to
enhance the creative experience of colouring, rather than
just replace it with technology. We are constantly working
to bring out more content in the form of pages and
interactivity.

``There's been a number of underlying
changes to the app which should improve the functionality
and performance, particularly on older and less powerful
mobile devices. We've also been working with augmented
reality technology developers and doing our own development.
We expect to announce more exciting news about these new
technologies which will be coming out in an app update
soon.

``In the coming months we're planning to
release a page pack - Amazing Animals of New Zealand. This
pack is based on the book of the same title by New Zealand
artist Bruce Mahalski, which introduces a range of native
New Zealand animals with colouring pages and information,
and is targeted at primary and intermediate aged
children.

``At the moment we have one page from the
pack available, which features a pukeko, which is available
for free with the app. The pukeko page has been extremely
popular worldwide - since the release of the App early last
year, on average the page is viewed by someone in the world
every minute,’’ Dr Clark says.

The app
technology was originally developed by Dr Clark at the
University of Canterbury's Human Interface Technology
Laboratory NZ (HIT Lab NZ). From there, the company Puteko
was formed, and an app was developed from this technology,
which is available for both Android and iOS devices, and has
already had more than 540,000 downloads.

HIT Lab NZ
is a research centre at the University of Canterbury
developing innovative human-computer interfaces including
visualisation, augmented reality, next generation
teleconferencing, applied interaction design and human-robot
interaction.

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